Tuesday, April 28, 2009

We spent last weekend building a board for Isaac's electric train set, and now we're practising running one train into the siding while the other loops around the main circuit. Isaac wants to run them both together and 'have a race'. Which engine will go faster? The bigger one, obviously. It's a battle between the Mallard (which any schoolchild knows was the fastest steam engine ever built) and a dumpy diesel-electric tank engine. No contest, then, in Isaac's view.

It reminds me of Piaget's Genevan studies on time, speed and distance. Claiming to have been put up to the challenge by Albert Einstein, with whom he had once shared an academic symposium, Piaget wanted to know whether children based their judgements of speed and distance on their reckoning about time, or whether their ideas about motion were more fundamental. Here's how I describe those experiments in the book:

Picking up on Einstein’s challenge, Piaget’s Genevan researchers presented children with various scenarios involving moving objects, such as clockwork snails crawling across a table, or two small dolls which were made to pass through tunnels of unequal length. Preoperational children would get hopelessly confused by questions about ‘how long’ and ‘how far’. Failing to take differences in speed, or starting and stopping points, into account, they might judge that something that had travelled further had also been travelling for more time. Slightly older children could use information about relative speed, such as the fact that one doll had overtaken another, but still tended to answer questions about temporal order in terms of spatial order: that is, interpreting questions about ‘before’ and ‘after’ in terms of distance rather than time.

Our own experiment is not a particularly accurate reprise of those classic Genevan studies. The relative speeds of our two engines actually seem to be changing constantly: one minute the Mallard is outstripping the tank engine, and the next the smaller loco is making all the running. Isaac is excited; I'm plain emotional. Much of what we've arranged here comes from my old boyhood train set, some of which in turn dates back to a train set from the 1950s. Thirty years ago I packed a handful of tiny black track pins into a Freightliner container, thinking 'They'll be useful again one day.' Today I'm sifting them in my clumsy, grown-up fingers, and reflecting on the foresight of that long-ago ten-year-old.

Monday, April 20, 2009

How much are children attuned to the troubles of the world? Quite a lot, it seems. A report out today, based on 1000 face-to-face interviews with six- to twelve-year-olds, shows that concerns about the global recession are topping the lists of children's reported worries. Fears of violence to self and others also loom large in children's lives, with 30% of respondents saying that the bullying was a problem.

I wasn't surprised to read about these young people's attunement to economic and political realities. A paper due out soon in the journal Infant and Child Development reports some work done by my graduate student, Sarah Laing, on children's fears, worries and ritualistic behaviours in middle childhood and adolescence. For her study, Sarah devised an in-depth interview in which 142 children aged between seven and sixteen rated how intensely they felt fears and worries about a range of topics, as well as getting an opportunity to come up with their own items of concern. We found that worry, as opposed to fear, was particularly strongly related to children's performance of ritualistic behaviours, such as bedtime routines—suggesting that these sorts of behaviours may provide children with a way of coping with high anxiety. We also found that bullying and harm befalling a loved one were prominent on children's lists of worries, a pattern that was clear right across the age range.

Sarah's study also showed that the anxieties of the age were finding their way into children's emotional worlds. Sarah collected her data in December 2004, when the war in Iraq was raging. The war was the most intense of all sources of worry for the 11–12-year-old age group, ranking as highly as worry about harm befalling a loved one. The good news is that fear and worry become less intense as children get older, although we found a surge in intensity at the end of adolescence, as (presumably) the realities of adulthood press ever more strongly.

I'm happy to send readers a preprint of the paper if they'd like to see it.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Those who are following the book on Twitter will have noticed this new development. Why anti-parenting? I think I'm simply trying to underline the point about this not being a parenting book, but rather an exhortation to use science and imagination to reach a better understanding of where small children are coming from. I'm hoping the tweets will be daily(ish).

Sunday, April 5, 2009

I'm in Denver, feeling slightly dazed at the end of the SRCD meeting. SRCD rolls around once every two years, and draws thousands of developmental psychologists to North America from all over the world. It's been an intense three days of symposia, posters and networking. I caught up with plenty of old friends and made some new ones, but also managed to get a feel for some new developments in the field, which I hope to write about here in the coming weeks. Right now, though, I need to catch up on some sleep and get over the effects of the altitude (Denver is the Mile High City) and the excellent Colorado beer.

Buy A Box Of Birds

Buy Pieces of Light (UK)

A Box of Birds: Reviews

'Arrestingly good prose… A thought-provoking novel that wrestles with the fundamentals of human nature.' Financial Times

'The plot, which flies past at genuine ‘page turner’ pace, involves a race to map the (fictional) Lorenzo Circuit, ‘the deep root-system of the self… the basis of memory, emotion and consciousness in the human brain’… I’m grateful for the siren warnings from the storytelling machine that is Charles Fernyhough.' The Psychologist

'A pleasantly sardonic narrator… There is… a certain edgy propulsion to the story, and the reveal of what is really going on in the bowels of Sansom’s research centre is deliciously horrible and deftly understated.' Guardian

'Part love story, part race against time to beat the baddies, Fernyhough can certainly write.' Daily Mail

'It’s rare these days to read a writer who cares about ideas in the way that the great nineteenth-century novelists did... This is both a serious novel and a great read.' Sara Maitland

'Exhilarating, thought-provoking and well worth the wait.' Andrew Crumey

Pieces of Light: Reviews

'Pieces of Light is utterly fascinating and superbly written. I learned more about memory from this book than any other. There are few science books around of this class.' Guardian

'Thoughtful… a deft guide to discoveries that have led memory researchers to stress the centrality of storytelling.' Booklist

'As absorbing as it is thought-provoking.' Sunday Business Post

'Remarkable storytelling skills... Seamlessly intersperses the personal aspects of [his] journey with descriptions of cutting-edge research into spatial naviation and memory manipulation, as well as new ideas about how memory works.' Moheb Costandi, Scientific American MIND

'With elegance and clinical sympathy, Fernyhough tells the stories of patients with various forms of brain damage that result in amnesia... a good, accessible read for anyone interested in their own recollections.' Professor Steven Rose, BBC Focus Magazine

'An absorbing guidebook to the mysterious terrain of human memory... In the tradition of Oliver Sacks’ casually shrewd scientific writing, the book blends dispatches from the frontiers of science with compassionate human anecdotes. Fernyhough’s enthralling narrative delivers gripping insight on the way memories shape our lives.'Editors’ Choice for w/c 19 March, iBookstore

'Weaving scientific research from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Fernyhough explains that our brains don’t record experiences as cameras do; rather, we store key elements, then reconstruct the experiences when we need them, imbuing them with present-day feelings and the benefit of hindsight.' Washington Post(read more)

'In its stunning blend of the literary with the scientific, Pieces of Light illuminates ordinary and extraordinary stories to remind us that who we are now has everything to do with who we were once, and that identity itself is intricately rooted in transporting moments of remembrance. We are what we remember.' André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Harvard Square

'His examination [is] welcoming and accessible to lay readers. His analysis is wide-ranging... He also covers a wide swath of literary and historical ground... A refreshingly social take on an intensely personal experience.' Publishers Weekly (read more)

'A multidisciplinary approach to explaining memory... Will be intriguing for readers interested in the borderlands where memoir, fiction and science overlap.' Kirkus Reviews (read more)

'In this lyrical exploration of our powers of recall, psychologist and novelist Charles Fernyhough argues that our memories are worth cherishing - even though some of what we think we remember is, in fact, fiction.' New Scientist Books of the Year (read more)

'In Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough has had the arresting idea of writing a book about memory that is also a memoir. As a psychologist clearly well up on the latest research, he shows how memory itself relies on language and storytelling. Investigating his own memories with a writerly eye, he brings to vibrant life scenes from a childhood refreshingly free of misery.' Sunday Times Books of the Year (read more)

'In his hybrid of autobiography, journalism and pop psychology, Fernyhough lets the stories speak for themselves to highlight memory’s personal, subjective and fragile qualities. Fernyhough takes us on a captivating journey into the mind. And he does so with great style.' Telegraph (read more)

'Outstanding… Fernyhough’s skills as a writer are evident both in the beautiful prose and in the way he uses literature to illustrate his argument… He draws on both science and art to marvellous effect.' Observer (read more)

'Restrained and lyrical... an immense pleasure.' New Scientist (read more)

'A sophisticated blend of findings from science, ideas from literature and examples from personal narratives… refreshing, well judged and at times moving. This is an unusual book but a very rewarding one.' Times Higher Education (read more)

'Fernyhough deftly guides us through memory's many facets... Often using himself as a test case, he adds context with research and snippets from a raft of great writers. A thoughtful study of how we make sense of ourselves.' Nature (read more)

'Absorbing... In offering us a meditation on memory, Fernyhough has something important to say about one of the forces that is central to our lives.' The Lady (read more)

'Fernyhough is a gifted writer who can turn any experience into lively prose... The stories in Pieces of Light... will entertain anyone who reads them.' Financial Times (read more)

'Many popular science writers try to blend the autobiographical and the anecdotal into their work; few do it as seamlessly and successfully as Charles Fernyhough.' Blackwell's Book Podcasts (read more)

'Fernyhough argues that we don’t simply possess a memory; we reconstruct it anew every time we need to remember… Through his own experiences and those of others, from the very young to the very old, he explores the mystery of remembering and the ambiguity of forgetting.' Saga Magazine

'An enthralling investigation of that ‘thing’ we call memory… manages to write about complex things in a clear and understandable way.' Ian McMillan, The Verb

'Pieces of Light will both linger in your memory and change the way you think about it.’ Daniel L. Schacter